The Halloween customs Americans observe today can be traced all the way back to the time of Julius Caesar, according to Hex Kleinmartin, archaeologist and lecturer in Buffalo State's Anthropology Department.

“The customs may go back even further,” said Kleinmartin, a scholar of the supernatural, “because the Celts didn’t keep written records.” It was the Romans who recorded the Celtic observations of a holiday called Samhain (pronounced SOW' in). According to Kleinmartin, most ancient agrarian cultures marked the calendar not only by the four major earth/sun events—the spring and fall equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices—but also by cross-quarter days, the days that fall halfway between the major events.

Halloween falls halfway between the fall equinox in late September and the winter solstice in late December. “It’s neither summer nor winter,” said Kleinmartin. “When boundaries seemed blurred, people were most likely to believe that supernatural events would occur.”

Because Samhain was a holiday that marked the end of the summer and the death of the old year’s growing season, it was especially important. It may have been a harvest feast, a day of remembering the dead, or both. Celebrations included communal feasts, costumes, and bonfires.

“Communal feasts were not just celebrations,” said Kleinmartin. “People wanted to use up the harvest crops that might not keep over the winter. And because it was a communal culture, the young men collected food from everyone.”

If spirits of the dead visited the living, it was not unreasonable to believe that some of them were evil. So to avoid any danger, people disguised themselves with costumes and masks.

Around 700, when All Saints Day was established, stories of a person called Jack appear. His many names include Jack Scratch and Stingy Jack, and the details of his exploits vary, but the stories agree that, after he died, neither heaven nor hell would have him. Instead, the devil sent him out to wander the world forever, holding a glowing ember in a lantern carved from a turnip.
It’s not hard to see the roots of today’s trick-or-treating, Halloween costumes, and jack-o-lanterns. What’s harder to explain is why this observation has persevered for two millennia.

Even if today’s Halloween practices aren’t based in real fear of, or belief in, the supernatural, Kleinmartin suggests they continue to allow people to engage in countercultural practices. “People can pretend they are someone else,” he said. “They can become someone they’d never be in ordinary life.”

Science, which nineteenth-century intellectuals expected would wipe out belief in the supernatural, has done no such thing. “Almost every human culture has had some form of belief in the supernatural, whether it’s just a collection of superstitions, ancestor worship, or a complex religion,” said Kleinmartin. “Cultures today are no different.”